Arkansas executed two convicted murderers on Monday night, the first time in almost 17 years that any state has executed two inmates on t...
Arkansas
executed two convicted murderers on Monday night, the first time in
almost 17 years that any state has executed two inmates on the same day,
as the state carries out a series of capital punishments before one of
its lethal injection drugs expires.
Jack
H. Jones Jr. died at 7:20 p.m. local time, and Marcel Williams at 10:33
p.m., both from the injection of a three-drug combination, after a
flurry of failed, last-ditch appeals. The executions in the death
chamber at the Cummings Unit, a state prison southwest of Pine Bluff,
came four days after the state put to death another killer, Ledell Lee. A
fourth condemned man, Kenneth Williams, is scheduled to be executed on
Thursday.
On
Monday, the courts rejected a series of appeals by Mr. Jones and Mr.
Williams, including an effort minutes before Mr. Williams’s execution,
arguing it would be unconstitutionally cruel, based on complications Mr.
Jones might have experienced. In a court filing, Mr. Williams’s lawyers
wrote that infirmary workers had tried unsuccessfully to insert a
central line in Mr. Jones’s neck for 45 minutes, before placing it
elsewhere on his body. Then Mr. Jones gulped for air during the
execution, the filing said, “evidence of continued consciousness.”
Judge
Kristine G. Baker of United States District Court in Little Rock, Ark.,
issued a temporary stay but ultimately rejected Mr. Williams’s claim,
allowing his execution to proceed.
Speaking
to reporters after the two executions, a spokesman for Gov. Asa
Hutchinson, J. R. Davis, called the procedures to carry out the
executions “flawless.”
Continue reading the main story
A
reporter who witnessed Mr. Jones’s execution said he gave a statement
in which he apologized to the daughter of the woman he killed. “I am not
a monster; there is a reason those things happened that day,” he said.
“I am so sorry, Lacey. Try to understand. I love you like my child.”
The
reporter, Andrew DeMillo of The Associated Press, said he saw Mr. Jones
move his lips for one to two minutes after the execution began. But he
did not detect pain on the man’s face, and it was not clear if he was
gasping for air.
In
a statement to reporters, the victim’s daughter, Lacey Seal, who
herself was beaten unconscious by Mr. Jones, 52, expressed relief at his
execution. “I am glad it’s done,” she said. “I’m glad that part of my
life, that chapter, is closed.”
At
the prison, a spokesman for the State Correction Department, Solomon
Graves, said both men had eaten their last meals. Mr. Jones requested
three pieces of fried chicken, potato logs with tartar sauce, beef jerky
bites, three Butterfinger bars, a chocolate milkshake with Butterfinger
pieces, and fruit punch.
Mr.
Williams requested three pieces of fried chicken, banana pudding,
nachos with chili cheese and jalapeño peppers, two Mountain Dews and
potato logs with ketchup.
After
12 years without an execution, Arkansas had planned to carry out eight
in 10 days, the biggest concentration in the United States in decades,
because its supply of one of the drugs has an April 30 expiration date.
Four of the executions were blocked by courts, and the timetable has
drawn protests and intense criticism from death-penalty opponents, who
cited the rushed schedule as evidence of the arbitrary way capital
punishment is applied.
The
last time a state carried out two capital sentences on the same day was
when Texas did it, in August 2000, at a time when executions were more
frequent in the United States.
What
drove Arkansas’s accelerated schedule was that the state’s store of
midazolam, one of the drugs used in its lethal injections, was set to
expire, and states have had trouble acquiring new supplies.
Like
several other states, Arkansas uses a three-drug combination in its
lethal injections, but in recent years, drug companies have refused to
sell their products for the purpose of executions. The first drug is
midazolam, a sedative intended to render the inmate unconscious, though
critics contend it is not always effective. The second drug is a
paralytic to halt breathing, and the third stops the heart.
A
flurry of legal challenges in state and federal courts followed news of
the state’s capital punishment schedule. Last Thursday, the state
carried out the execution of Mr. Lee,
51, for the murder of Debra Reese, who was sexually assaulted and
clubbed to death in 1993. Mr. Lee, the first inmate executed in Arkansas
since 2005, maintained his innocence.
In
the days before Monday’s scheduled executions of Mr. Williams and Mr.
Jones, their lawyers challenged the use of midazolam. They argued that
the two inmates’ particular medical conditions made it likely that the
sedative would be ineffectual, making the executions unconstitutionally
painful.
Judge
Baker ruled against the condemned men, whose lawyers appealed to the
United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. The appeals court
turned them down. Judge Baker also ruled against the inmates in a
separate challenge over when the curtains to the death chamber should be
opened, allowing witnesses in an adjoining room to view the execution.
In
1995, Mr. Jones raped, beat and strangled Mary Phillips, who was 34,
and beat and choked her daughter, Lacey, who was 11 at the time, to
unconsciousness, but the girl survived. He has admitted guilt and said
repeatedly that he did not want clemency.
Mr.
Williams, 46, kidnapped, robbed, raped and strangled Stacy Errickson in
1994, and has also admitted his guilt. Ms. Errickson, 22, had two
children.
Kenneth
Williams, the man scheduled to die on Thursday, killed a cheerleader at
the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff in December 1998 but escaped
from a maximum-security prison after a jury sentenced him to life the
next year. A few miles from the prison, he fatally shot Cecil Boren, a
farmer who was working in the yard while his wife was at church, and
stole his truck. Mr. Williams led the police into Missouri in a
high-speed chase before he crashed into a car, killing the driver. In
2005, he confessed to killing a 36-year-old man the same day he shot the
cheerleader.
COMMENTS